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Saturday, 19 March 2016

Trade Secrets

Trade Secrets

By George Monbiot

Why will no one answer the obvious, massive question about
TTIP?

When a government proposes to abandon one of the fundamental
principles of justice, there had better be a powerful reason. Equality before
the law is not ditched lightly. Surely? Well read this and judge for yourself.

The UK government, like that of the US and 13 other EU
member, wants to set up a separate judicial system, exclusively for the use of
corporations. While the rest of us must take our chances in the courts,
corporations across the EU and US will be allowed to sue governments before a
tribunal of corporate lawyers. They will be able to challenge the laws they
don’t like, and seek massive compensation if these are deemed to affect their
“future anticipated profits”.

I’m talking about the proposed Transatlantic Trade and
Investment Partnership (TTIP) and its provisions for “investor state dispute
settlement”. If this sounds incomprehensible, that’s mission accomplished:
public understanding is lethal to this attempted corporate coup.

The TTIP is widely described as a trade agreement. But while
in the past trade agreements sought to address protectionism, now they seek to
address protection. In other words, once they promoted free trade by removing
trade taxes (tariffs), now they promote the interests of transnational capital
by downgrading the defence of human health, the natural world, labour rights
and the poor and vulnerable from predatory corporate practices.

The proposed treaty has been described by the eminent
professor of governance Colin Crouch as “post-democracy in its purest form.”
Post-democracy refers to our neutron bomb politics, in which the old
structures, such as elections and parliaments, remain standing, but are
uninhabited by political power. Power has shifted to other forums, unamenable
to public challenge: “small, private circles where political elites do deals
with corporate lobbies.”

Investor-state dispute settlement means allowing
corporations to sue governments over laws which might affect their profits. The
tobacco company Philip Morris is currently suing Australia and Uruguay, under
similar treaties, for their attempts to discourage smoking. It describes the
UK’s proposed rules on plain packaging as “unlawful if TTIP goes ahead, expect
a challenge.

Corporations, like natural persons, can use the courts to
defend their interests. But, under current treaties, investor-state dispute
settlement lets them apply instead to offshore tribunals operating in secret,
without such basic safeguards as third-party standing, judicial review and
rights of appeal. As Colin Crouch notes, this is not just post-democracy, but
“post-law.”

On Wednesday, the TTIP is debated in the House of Commons.
Next month negotiations resume between the US and the EU. So you’d have
imagined that our government might, by now, have sought to justify it.

There is only one possible justification for a separate
judicial system: a failure by the existing courts fairly to arbitrate the legal
claims that businesses make. So which judicial systems in the US or the EU
discriminate unfairly against corporations?

I have asked this question (via Twitter) to the business
secretary Vince Cable, his deputy, Lord Livingstone and the Conservative leader
in the European Parliament, Syed Kamall. Resounding silence. I have asked it in
this column, three times. Nothing. I have asked the business department by
phone. After an attempt by its spokesperson to suggest that there could be
something wrong with the US system, and a subsequent failure to explain what
this might be, he sent me this statement: “Investor protection is needed as
domestic courts are not the typical route for investors to seek redress”. Not
the typical route? That’s it?

In the House of Commons, Zac Goldsmith MP asked the business
minister to name the occasions in the past five years in which companies in the
EU or US have been discriminated against in courts across the Atlantic. Answer:
the government “does not have access to relevant information.”

The European Commission argues that “the main reason for
having an ISDS mechanism is because in many countries investment agreements are
not directly enforceable in domestic courts.” Perhaps. But none of those
countries are in the proposed trading bloc. A condition of EU membership is “an
independent and efficient judiciary” with “legal guarantees for fair trial
procedures”. What is a provision designed to protect investors in failed states
doing in a treaty between the EU and the US?

David Cameron has attempted a different argument. At the G20
summit last year, he said “we’ve signed trade deal after trade deal and there
has never been a problem in the past.” It’s the dangerous driver defence: I’ve
done 100mph loads of times, and I’m still alive, aren’t I?

Yes, we’ve been lucky so far; luckier than other nations in
Europe, which so far have been sued 127 times under investor-state clauses in
other treaties. The Czech Republic, Slovakia and Poland have had to pay out
enough money to have employed 380,000 nurses for a year(. Investor-state cases
are escalating rapidly(: as corporations begin to understand the power they’ve
been granted, they will turn their attention from the weak nations to the
strong ones.

No one will provide a justification because no one can. To
protect transnational capital from a non-existent risk, our governments are
recklessly abandoning the principle of equality before the law.

I believe that we can win this. We have won it before, when
the treaty they now call TTIP was the Multilateral Agreement on Investment.
After a massive public response it was defeated in 1998. Now they are trying
again, with a different name.

Already, two petitions have gathered 2.5 million signatures
between them. In response, the EU has frantically been making concessions. For
the first time in its history, it has made its negotiating positions public. It
has launched a consultation on investor-state dispute settlement (though still,
after 6 months, not published the results; promised protections for public
services and proposed to improve the offshore arbitration system – while still
failing to explain what’s wrong with the courts we already possess. These are
desperate concessions from an organisation that knows the window is closing: if
it can’t secure an agreement before the next US election, TTIP is probably
finished.

So keep marching, keep signing, keep joining the campaigns
that have come together under the Stop TTIP banner. Ask yourself whether, in an
age of ecocide, food banks and financial collapse, we need more protection from
predatory corporate practices or less. This is a reckless, unjustified
destruction of our rights. We can defeat it.

about me

A new counter-culture is now spreading across the planet, a movement dedicated to protesting at the outlandish behaviour of the control freaks, with their surveillance, eavesdropping, secrecy and lies. Their greed and belligerent sabre rattling and their industries of war. The dream is to replace these sociopaths with Love!

I wish this blog to be a small part of this - We must be the change.

We will be set to task to rebuild our world and our planet from centuries of decimation and destruction brought on by the fallacy, the belief that we once tragically and collectively embraced thousands of years ago – the mistaken notion that we are separate from one another and everything else on the planet and in the universe. We will finally recognize that the truth is just the opposite – we are all one with everything on the planet and in the universe. We are spiritual beings, infinite consciousness simply having a human experience, and as soon we come to fully recognize and understand this, it will then finally be time for us to fly – to shine in all of our infinite, glorious possibility...